Skip to content

Category Archives: Linux

Issues dealing with the LinuxOS.

Encrypted home directory with Ubuntu 8.04

 My encrypted home directory worked  well with 8.04, I only had to make one change caused by the new xml format of the pam_mount.conf.xml file as follows:
<volume user="summetj" fstype="crypt" path="/dev/sda6" mountpoint="/home/summetj"         options="cipher=aes" fskeycipher="aes-256-ecb"         fskeypath="/home/summetj.key" />
After I installed 8.04 from scratch I had to mount the directory and chown the files to the [...]

MythTV / MythDVD movie ripping / playback problem (Solved!)

I have used Myth to rip a large number of my DVD's to AVI files (using either the Excellent or Good setting).  Now that I am starting to play back the movies, I have found something that is very troubling.
On many of the movies, the first 95% of the movie (e.g. 1:13 min of [...]

Connecting to non-broadcasting SSID networks with IPW2200

I have been having problems connecting to a wireless network that does not broadcast its  SSID. (A so-called "hidden" network.) I am using an Intel IPW 2200 802.11b/g mini-pci wireless card that uses the ipw2200 wireless module.
I found that reloading the ipw2200 module before attempting to connect to the network fixed my problems (but only [...]

DPMS monitor control via remote control on Myth TV

I am using an LCD monitor as the display for my MythTV box, connected via an analog RGB (a.k.a. VGA) cable. This allows me to use DPMS (Display Power Management Signaling) to turn the monitor on and off from the MythTV box.
Instructions for setting this up with MythTV are here , but I found that [...]

Fixing a missing bluetooth icon, battery charge indicator, and update notifier in Ubuntu

For the last week my battery indicator and bluetooth icons had been missing from my top panel in Ubuntu. When I did Bluetooth stuff the pop-up "speaker balloons" from the bluetooth applet would still appear at the corner of my screen, but the Bluetooth applet itself was "invisible". I finally figured out [...]

Phillips Webcam with Linux

I bought 30 Phillips SPC  900 NC webcams because they claim to support up to 90fps and I have had good luck using linux with the PWC drivers in the past.  Plugged into a generic Ubuntu 7.10 install, I found that 640×480 resolution was automatic, with 15fps. 320×240 worked at 30fps. (I tried 160×120 resolution, [...]

Fixing Program Guide data on MythTV after Daylight Savings Time switch

I'm running MythTV (Subversion Trunk) on a Ubuntu 7.10 box. After the daylight savings time changeover, my mythtv box had the correct time, but the Program Guide data was still off by an hour.  Manually running a mythfilldatabase didn't fix it. After checking to make sure that my timezone xmltv settings were set to Auto, [...]

Mythtv gotchas when upgrading from Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty) to 7.10 (Gutsy)

I upgraded my Mythtv server from Feisty to Gutsy for no good reason (other than I like the pain).
Gotchas I ran into when trying to get MythTV working again:
1. The upgrade lost/removed the libqt3-mysql support from my computer. This resulted in the MythTV applications (frontend and backend) giving "unable to connect to database" errors. As [...]

On the fly external monitor support (mirroring / spanning) on Ubuntu 7.10

My IBM X31 laptop has the capability to drive an external VGA monitor in addition to it's built in XGA (1024×768) Laptop Video Display Screen (LVDS). The new xrandr extension allows non-privlidged users to change monitor layouts on-the-fly. And now, thanks to my friend Tracy, I know the "extra magic" to make it all work.

Tuning an ext3 filesystem for storing large media files

I added a new hard disk to my MythTV box, specifically for storing movies copied from my DVD collection. Because this disk will be used for storing mostly files that will be in the 1-4GB size range, and because it is NOT going to be used as the root (/) drive of this computer, I [...]